the Accountability Incompleteness Theorem

The Accountability Horizon: An Impossibility Theorem for Governing Human-Agent Collectives

arXiv:2604.07778v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing accountability frameworks for AI systems, legal, ethical, and regulatory, rest on a shared assumption: for any consequential outcome, at least one identifiable person had enough involvement and foresight to bear meaningful responsibility. This paper proves that agentic AI systems violate this assumption not as an engineering limitation but as a mathematical necessity once autonomy exceeds a computable threshold. We introduce...